The second member of my ‘Dream Team’ is Anna Beaudry with Anna Beaudry Photographic Design. She has photographed all the interiors on my website and we have also worked together on some styling projects.
From the beginning stages of designing my website I decided not to show ‘before’ photographs because I noticed that established designers on the internet rarely show images of their interiors before they were decorated.
This is also why, if you (as a designer) are going to have a website, professional photography is not optional. Consider it an investment in your business. A return that will come back much faster in new clients than your own ‘point and shoot’ efforts.
One year ago last spring, I took a course from a New York designer on “How to be your own photographer” because I was getting ready to get my website designed and thought this would be a good way to learn to do it myself.
Here are 4 tips from the professionals photographing interiors:
1) Turn off the flash when taking photos of interiors. Otherwise it just washes out all colour and kills the atmospheric quality of the lighting in the room.
2) Taking a photo of an entire room is okay, but even better when you do close-ups of vignettes [below].
3) When taking photos of tile in a bathroom (for example) go right inside the shower to get a close-up of the tile (instead of just snapping a photo of the shower doors, etc).
4) When shooting a room, line your camera up with something vertical. And don’t include the corner of another space in the room (above), it looks better without that vertical angle.
So, good tips right? I should be an expert now? Wrong.
When Anna came to take photos of the spaces I had decorated, she never ONCE took a picture from the same angle that I did. The angle she chose was always so much better than mine. (see above & below)
A photographer will usually scout the space before to find out which time of day the light is the best for the photograph. See the photo below where the afternoon sun was already starting to come through the windows? It’s too hard to control the light at that point (for this space anyway), so the professional photo was taken late morning before the sun came around the corner of the building!
Hire a professional for everything you can’t do professionally yourself. It’s my mantra for this week :)
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How to Style a kitchen for a Photo Shoot – 3 rules to Follow
